Perched on a bluff above Haskell's Beach where the Santa Barbara coastline curves toward Point Conception, the 358-room Bacara Resort — now operating as The Ritz-Carlton Bacara, Santa Barbara — was designed by Backen, Arrigoni & Ross and opened in 2000 as one of the more serious attempts to extend Santa Barbara's Spanish Colonial Revival tradition into large-scale resort architecture. The whitewashed stucco volumes, red clay roof tiles, arched openings, and dark-stained wood shutters visible throughout the property draw directly from the George Washington Smith and Bertram Goodhue vocabulary that defines the city's civic identity, scaled across a 78-acre site with enough restraint to avoid the theme-park register that trip so many resort projects of its era. Inside, the interiors move between two registers visible in the images: the grander suites furnished with dark-turned four-poster beds, exposed rough-hewn ceiling beams, hand-painted Spanish tile floors, and ikat-patterned textiles in indigo and sand, and the more recently refreshed oceanfront rooms where the palette lightens to warm linen, travertine fireplaces, and lacquered accent tables opening onto wrought-iron balconies with unobstructed Channel Islands views. The pool terrace, framed by tall Canary Island date palms against the spa building's circular rotunda, and the clifftop dining terrace planted with agaves and coastal sage, together give the property a landscape character that feels genuinely rooted in its particular stretch of the California littoral.

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